In 1930 Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines moved to Pound Farm, Dedham in Essex. Morris cancelled his contract with London gallery Arthur Tooth & Sons (despite their great success in selling his flower paintings) and resigned from both the Seven and Five Society and London Artists’ Association. At Pound Farm, Morris could keep a menagerie of animals and devote himself to horticulture. He began breeding irises in 1934, eventually developing over 80 different varieties, and in 1949 received the Foster Memorial Plaque for his exceptional contribution to the field.

This outstanding painting was made in the same year Morris and Lett-Haines opened their home as a private art school. The school, which later moved to Benton End, Hadleigh, Suffolk, was an instant success, attracting over 60 students. In this idyllic setting, students could draw in the gardens or by the River Stour. Painting was discussed over communal meals of homegrown vegetables.

Here Morris presents a cropped section of flowers in a vase. His image, bursting with detail, is informed by direct observation and a degree of invention based upon his encyclopaedic knowledge of flowers. The picture contains at least 11 varieties of iris, intermingled with a selection of cultivated and wild flowers, including an arum lily, cistus, poppies, balloon flowers and two types of foxglove. Morris’s flowers are as characterful as his studies of people and birds. In the catalogue for Morris’s Tate Gallery exhibition, gardener Beth Chatto noted that the artist ‘could not have painted flower pictures with so remarkable a degree of insight if he had not known the plants intimately by being a “dirty hands gardener” on his knees from dawn to dusk.’

Rather than prettiness and delicacy, however, Morris saw in his floral ‘sitters’ a libidinal energy. As he said ‘[it is] the attributes of grimness, ruthlessness, lust and arrogance that I find, and above all, the absence of fear in their kingdom’. 2

By the mid-1920s, Morris had settled on a technique that remained largely unchanged for the rest of his career. Without any under drawing, he would launch straight into a painting, seemingly able to retain in his mind a vision of the finished composition. Glyn Morgan describes how ‘Cedric...would start at the top of the canvas and work his way in rows to the bottom, rather like knitting a pullover’. 3 Here Morris’s closely arranged marks form a distinctive, rhythmic whole, the undulating surface revealed in raking light.

1 Cedric Morris, ‘Concerning Flower Painting’, The Studio, CXXIII, 1942, pp121-132
2 Gwenneth Reynolds and Diana Grace, Benton End Remembered, Cedric Morris Lett Haines and The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, Unicorn Press, London, 2002, p18